Day 13 of 60 (Water Water Buffalo): A Plethora of Options

This starts our second 12 “year” cycle, returning to a Water Buffalo year. On the Chinese calendar, it’s the Ox, but this challenge is partially to honor my Viet sister’s dad. So, I’m using the Viet animals. That means Cat and Water Buffalo instead of Rabbit and Ox.

One unexpected side effect this challenge is it’s forced me to think about all the projects I’ve been wanting/meaning to do. It’s also caused me to think in more detail about the things I want to do for career development. Some of those are personal (things I want to build/learn). I had a “conversation” on Twitter today with Jeff and Mariatta (with a special guest appearance from Eric!) about static site generators. I’m using Jekyll on this site, but I want to play with some of the other ones written in Python. Mariatta and I would BOTH prefer to write in RST. Anyway, that’ll be ANOTHER project to blog about.

Some are to help support the overall community AND some people who’ve been helpful and supportive to me. Part of that includes thoroughly reading and reviewing books by awesome folks, probably starting with:

I need to read BOTH of these books, just for my own professional development. Two Scoops is, as the subtitle suggests, best practices for Django. Written by Audrey & Danny Roy Greenfeld (not sure if their last name is hyphenated), this is the latest book in a series that they update with new long-term support (LTS) releases of Django. In addition to being skilled and experienced developers, they’re both very nice people and great members of the community.

TDD w/ Python, written by the inimitable Harry J.W. Percival is an excellent introduction to TDD in Python web apps, with a focus on Selenium and JavaScript, two tools I work with at work and want to become more skilled with. The 2nd Edition of Harry’s book has recently been released, and that’s an EXCELLENT excuse for me to go through it COMPLETLY this time (I never finished the first edition 😒…) AND write a review. Harry is ALSO and excellent member of our Python community and I’ve had the pleasure of taking one of his tutorials, which really helped expand my thinking on software design. I DARE you to find a person more excited and energetic about TDD!

One of the realities of the modern world is money, which often involves the sale of things. When it comes to books, one thing that helps boost sales of books is reviews, especially reviews on Amazon. So, In addition to helping myself out by learning the material in these two books (and others!), I’d ALSO like to help the authors by writing a quality review of their books. I’d ALSO like to be in a position to give informed recommendations of these books to people, as I’m often asked about this sort of thing. Not just, “this is a good book”, but to be able to provide more detail about WHY I think it’s good and who it is (and isn’t) good for. So, a thorough reading of these books will let me help myself, the authors AND newer community members.